Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms
Prof. Rik Belew
University of California-San Diego (visiting U. Wisconsin-Madison)
rik@cs.ucsd.edu, belew@cs.wisc.edu
12:05 pm Wed. Sep. 27 in 5134 Chamberlin Hall
Even the simplest creature is marvelous to observe as it transforms
itself to better match the environment in which it finds itself. How
is such adaptation accomplished? How much of this capability should
be attributed to the particular individual we happen to be observing,
how much to its species, and how much to the inclusive evolutionary
processes wedding all life to this planet? How did the elaborate
individual learning process we find in complex organisms evolve? Once
in place, how does an increased individual capacity for adaptation
alter the selective pressures causing the species to adapt to its
niche?
This talk will give an overview of a book (of the same title) edited
by R. K. Belew and Melanie Mitchell, to be published soon by
Addison-Wesley. The book grew out of a workshop at the Santa Fe
Institute which brought together a group of about 20 scientists from
biology, psychology, and computer science, all studying interactions
between the evolution of populations and individuals' adaptations in
those populations, and all of whom made some use of computational
tools in their work. A good example is the ``Baldwin effect,''
a phenomena identified by the psychologist J. Mark Baldwin almost
exactly a century ago, that arises repeatedly in many modern computer
simulations. This talk will touch on the rich historical heritatge of
such phenomena, ranging from biologists like Lamarck and Waddington to
psychologists like Piaget and Skinner, as well as the new insights
offered by computer simulations and new algorithms inspired by the
same insights.